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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: Aristophanes, in one of his later comedies (Frogs), speaks of 'thousands of
tragedy-making prattlers,' whose attempts at poetry he compares to the
chirping of swallows; 'their garrulity went far beyond Euripides,'--'they
appeared once upon the stage, and there was an end of them.' To a man of
genius who had a real appreciation of the godlike Aeschylus and the noble
and gentle Sophocles, though disagreeing with some parts of their
'theology' (Rep.), these 'minor poets' must have been contemptible and
intolerable. There is no feeling stronger in the dialogues of Plato than a
sense of the decline and decay both in literature and in politics which
marked his own age. Nor can he have been expected to look with favour on
the licence of Aristophanes, now at the end of his career, who had begun by
The Republic |
